Kennesaw State University:

TCID Department Proposal

April 4, 2022
Morgan Patterson
Lauren Duty
 TCID PROPOSAL
Contents
Introduction ................................................................................................................................................ 4
Current Situation........................................................................................................................................ 5
Issues within the TCID Department ................................................................................................ 5
Marketing and Publicity ................................................................................................................... 5
Website Design ................................................................................................................................... 6
Project Plan: Remarketing TCID .............................................................................................................. 7
Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 7
Phase One: Program Showcasing ........................................................................................................ 7
Phase Two: Website Redesign .............................................................................................................. 8
Qualifications ............................................................................................................................................ 10
Labor and Personnel ........................................................................................................................ 10
History and Facilities ....................................................................................................................... 10
A Media Company for Every Need ............................................................................................... 10
Project Costs and Plan Benefits .............................................................................................................. 11
Hard Benefits ........................................................................................................................................ 11
Soft Benefits .......................................................................................................................................... 12
Value Benefits ....................................................................................................................................... 12
Appendix ................................................................................................................................................... 13
Budget Rational .................................................................................................................................... 13
Table A: The Budget ............................................................................................................................ 13
References ................................................................................................................................................. 14

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 TCID PROPOSAL
Reinvent Media
1100 South Marietta Parkway
Marietta, GA 30060

February 7, 2022
Kathy Schwaig, Interim President
Kennesaw State University
585 Cobb Avenue NW
Kennesaw, GA 30144

Dear President Schwaig,

Thank you for the opportunity to submit a pre-proposal in response to the Technical
Communication and Interactive Design Department’s “Request for Proposals for TCID
Department Funding” (January 27, 2022). Our pre-proposal outlines a plan that will help
increase the number of technical communication and interactive design majors and minors, while
also promoting the growth of KSU’s student population.

To help increase the number of TCID majors, we suggest the use of promotional strategies such
as promo videos, program showcases, and social media to help pique the interest of potential
KSU students. This would allow the TCID department to gain more publicity while also
increasing the overall student population by increasing interest in majors/minors of technical
communication and interactive design. The second suggestion is the redesign of the TCID
department’s webpage. A redesigned webpage could potentially help increase user traffic of
potential students, current students, faculty, parents, and alumni.

There are additional potential benefits to increasing the TCID student population. The faculty
population could increase and the number of TCID classes offered could also increase.

Thank you for your time and consideration. If you have any questions or need further
information, please contact us at 777-222-4625 or Mpatterson@rm.com, or Lduty@rm.com.

Sincerely,

Morgan Patterson
Morgan Patterson
Founder and Chief Marketing Officer

Lauren Duty
Lauren Duty
Social Media Specialist and Coordinator

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 TCID PROPOSAL

Introduction
The Technical Communication and Interactive Design Department (TCID) is one of the
eleven departments in the Norman J. Radow College of Humanities and Social Science
at Kennesaw State University. The department offers two undergraduates, with
Bachelor of Science degrees, in Technical Communication and Interactive Design. The
department also offers these subjects as a minor and certificate.

The Technical communication program has remained the only technical communication
degree program in the Atlanta area for 25 years. The TCID department focuses on the
“tech” in technical communication, while also applying humanities-based thinking in
their work. The newest program in the TCID department is the Interactive Design
program (IAD), which was established in 2016. The IAD program addresses the need
for emerging competencies in user interface design and development. Both programs
help enrich the educational lives of students with internships, cutting-edge coursework,
and career-centered practices.

The TCID department offers such valuable and interesting degree options but
unfortunately is lacking the publicity it deserves. With the decreasing student numbers,
the TCID department faces multiple challenges that could possibly affect the future of
the department. With the right decision, the TCID department can increase student
numbers, increase class opportunities, recruit new faculty, and generate more revenue.

To help KSU make the best decision, this proposal suggests a marketing strategy that
will help increase the number of TCID students. We propose that TCID Department
should use better promotion strategies and redesign its webpage to help promote
current and incoming KSU to become technical communication majors or minors. The
suggestions will help improve the overall interest and publicity, yet it will not take
away from the other majors that KSU houses.

In this proposal, we will first discuss the problems and the current situation that the
TCID Department is facing. Second, we will offer a plan that uses different marketing
strategies to help promote the department to students. Third, we will review our
qualifications at Reinvent Media to assist KSU with the TCID Department’s marketing
strategy. And finally, we will go over some of the costs and benefits of our plan. Our
goal is to show you that by remarketing the TCID Department, it can continue not to
only grow and benefit itself but can also help Kennesaw State University as a whole.

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 TCID PROPOSAL

Current Situation
Issues within the TCID Department
The TCID Department has offered the only technical communication program in
Atlanta for the past 25 years and began offering Interactive design a few years ago.
However, even with being such high-demand majors in today’s workplace, the TCID
Department lacks a student population in comparison to other departments. The
Department has a total of 260 students within the department. A large portion of that
population is IAD majors with 220 students and 40 students being TCOM majors.

A major contributor to the shortage of students is the lack of marketing and advertising
for the department and its programs. 25% of TCID majors are internal transfer students,
who first start as other majors and then switch to TCID after being unhappy with their
previous major. Many TCID students, agreed that if they knew what the TCID
department was and the programs it offers before coming to KSU, they would have
been more likely to directly enroll as a TCID major, rather than switching. With this lack
of marketing and advertising, the department is missing out on opportunities to recruit
potential TCID students.

Marketing and Publicity

Marketing and publicity are key at any university when trying to promote students.
Strategies such as active social media, utilizing alumni, and promotional events and
videos allow for students to interact and
get interested in departments and
programs. However, when departments
fail to use these strategies it can impact
them greatly. While the TCID
department follows some of these
strategies, it still has major room for
improvement. The department does
have three social media accounts
• Twitter
Figure 1. TCID Dept. Facebook (facebook.com/tcid.ksu)
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
These accounts are not updated regularly and
are not the social media site students regularly
use. Without strong social media and other
marketing strategies, the department will
continue to struggle to connect with the student
population and will not help promote more
TCID students. We can help improve this issue
by establishing new marketing and advertising
strategies to help recruit new TCID students.
Figure 2. TCID Dept. Twitter (twitter.com/TCID_KSU)
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 TCID PROPOSAL
Website Design
Having a reliable and navigable website is very important to new users trying to learn
more about the department. A department website is aimed toward a larger audience
besides students and must be able to meet each audiences’ needs. There are many issues
within the TCID Departments website such as
• Outdated Information Figure 3. radow.kennesaw.edu/tcid/resources/general.php

• Redundant tabs
• Broken links
For example, Figure 3 shows the
issue of redundant tabs. The tabs in
the navigation bar take the user to
the same page as the links on
another tabs page.

These issues do not allow users

easily navigate the page and can
keep them from finding what they
are looking for. This gives the
department a bad reputation and
deters students from joining the
program. Without fixing these
issues, the website will keep
getting progressively hard to use and users will not even visit the website. With a
website redesign, we can offer a new interface that satisfies the needs of each audience
when browsing.

Though these issues seem very minor, they are contributing to a large problem within
the department. When an issue like this goes unchecked and unresolved, it can lead to a
snowball effect until the worst-case scenario occurs. For this case, with the technical
communication program only having 40 students, if this number keeps declining then
the whole program is at risk of getting cut.

How do we solve these issues? We at Reinvent Media are proposing a TCID

remarketing plan that can help solve and improve the issue listed above by using our
marketing knowledge and skill to help improve advertising and promotion of the
department and the department’s website.

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 TCID PROPOSAL

Project Plan: Remarketing TCID

Introduction
In order to improve the current media and increase the student population, the TCID
department requires a solution that encourages growth and engagement. We believe a
successful solution would meet the following objectives:

• Showcase the current TCID programs through promotional events.

• Redesign the TCID Department website.

To meet these objectives, Reinvent Media proposes to collaborate with the TCID
department to develop an effective solution following the objectives above. The primary
goal of our plan is to significantly increase the number of students that enroll in TCID
programs each year. In turn, this result should relieve some of the existing pressure
experienced by staff within this department and create appealing, accessible media for
several audiences.

Our plan will be implemented in two major phases. The first phase will focus on
showcasing the department. The second phase will aim to redesign the department’s
website. Each of these phases will consist of smaller tasks, which are necessary actions
for the success of each major step.

Phase One: Program Showcasing

We will begin this project by promoting the TCID department. It is important to note
that our promotion of the department will take place in two different formats. Our
project teams will be creating videos surrounding your degree opportunities.
Additionally, we would like to assist you in hosting special events, on and off-campus,
that showcase TCID programs. Both of these promotional formats will utilize KSU
Alumni who graduated as Technical Communication or Interactive Design majors.

First, we would like to put together 3-4 promotional videos for TCID majors and career
possibilities. To complete this task, we will be utilizing our videographers at Reinvent
Media. The video production teams consist of five individuals who will need access to
areas on the KSU campuses. Specific areas may include classrooms, common spaces,
and usability labs. From start to finish, the production of the promotional videos should
take 2 weeks. This timeline considers the need to collect video content, construct full-
length videos, and make edits according to KSU’s style guide.

Second, we will plan and assist in facilitating events for the TCID department. At this
time, we plan to complete 3 events with your department. However, this number is
flexible, and we are open to adding or subtracting the number of promotional events.
The implementation of these events will require several small phases, which are listed
below:

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 TCID PROPOSAL
• Event planning: Reinvent Media will schedule some meeting with your
department to plan promotional events. This will include discussion topics such
as time, location, duration, etc.

• Equipment inventory: we will need to conduct a small assessment of the

resources needed for each event. First, we will identify your existing resources.
Then, we will determine what resources are still needed and how we will obtain
them.

• Event setup: on the date of each promotional event, Reinvent Media will supply
teams to address any of the required setups. The time spent on setup will be
determined by the nature of the event.

• Event facilitation: Several of our team members will be present at the

promotional events to ensure everything goes according to plan.

• Event cleanup: After each event, our team will also assist in packing away
equipment, cleaning any mess, and restoring venues to their original state. We
do this to make the experience less overwhelming and more profitable for your
department.

The timing of these events is currently unknown. A detailed timeline for promotional
events will need to be determined during the event planning meetings. The showcasing
events can occur at times that work best for your institution. We understand that your
schedule may be incredibly full at times, so we are willing to be flexible in our
collaboration.

Phase Two: Website Redesign

The second phase of the plan focuses on redesigning the TCID Department webpage.
Our project team will be formatting the layout and improving the contests of the
website while following the KSU style guide. We would also like to conduct a heuristic
evaluation to make sure that the website is user-centered.

First, we will conduct a heuristic evaluation of the current website to further

understand the issues within the website. A heuristic evaluation is a process where
experts use rules of thumb to measure the usability of user interfaces. For this
evaluation, we would use Jakob Nielsen’s 10 heuristics.

1. Visibility of system status

2. Match between system and the real world
3. User control and freedom
4. Consistency and standards
5. Error Prevention
6. Recognition rather than recall
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design
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 TCID PROPOSAL
9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
10. Help and documentation

By following these heuristics, we can determine the strong and weak points within the
website and then plan a redesign accordingly. This step should only take 2-4 days to
complete.

Second, our team will work on reformatting and solving the that we found. This would
include
• Relocating and naming tabs
• Updating links and information
• Problems found during the heuristic evaluation.

We would need access to KSU’s domain to be able to access the website. KSU also
requires anything that is marjeting the university to follow its guidelines. Things such
as colors, font styles, logos, pictures can only be use if permitted under the guidelines.
We would make sure to follow these guidelines diligently to proper market KSU and
the TCID Deartment.Redesigning and reformatting should take around 3-4weeks to
complete.

After solving these issues, we would like to conduct another heuristic to make sure that
all the points are covered and that it will be easier for users to navigate and understand.
This would take around 1-2 days. We would then relaunch the website and monitor it
to make sure that all the changes are running smoothly. Monitoring should only be
around a week unless there are issues found during that time.

The goal of this plan is to help set the way for the TCID Department to recruit more
students. Phase one focuses on showcasing the department to recruit and interest
potential TCID students. Phase two focuses the getting information and navigating the
department through its website. By following each phase and step we are closer to
being able to help better market, advertise and navigate the TCID departments. To
execute this plan, we at Reinvent Media are the best qualified to carry out all phases
and steps of the plan.

Figure 4. www.pngitem.com

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 TCID PROPOSAL

Qualifications
At Reinvent Media, we understand that change is critical for the
TCID department at Kennesaw State University. To maintain
and expand the number of students and staff, the TCID
department needs to restructure its media and marketing
strategies. However, the department cannot risk a shift in focus
away from preserving its current state. It may seem like a
daunting task, but you do not have to face the change alone.
Reinvent Media is equipped and prepared to handle this project.

Labor and Personnel

With decades of combined experience in the marketing and media industry, our team
offers a unique skill set and valuable insight, which are necessary for the success of this
project.

Morgan Patterson is the Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Reinvent Media. She
earned her bachelor’s degree in Technical Communication and Interactive Design minor
at Kennesaw State University. She then attended Stanford University and received her
master's degree in Marketing. After working in the marketing industry for a few years,
she founded Reinvent Media. Morgan has now had a career in marketing and media for
20 years and has worked with several companies and organizations to help better their
marketing strategies.

Lauren Duty is the Digital Marketing Specialist and Coordinator at Reinvent Media.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in Technical Communication from Kennesaw State
University. To expand her abilities, she attended KSU for another two years and
received a bachelor’s degree in Marketing. Lauren has had a career in Media for 18
years and has worked with numerous companies and organizations. She joined
Reinvent Media in 2012 and has been contributing to the company’s success since then.

History and Facilities

Reinvent Media is currently the leading company in the media and marketing industry.
In 2003, the company was founded by Morgan Patterson. Currently, the company has
one office location in Kennesaw, Georgia with over 60 employees. The office houses all
of the equipment necessary to handle your marketing and media goals.

A Media Company for Every Need

We are passionate about assisting the outreach and growth of companies, organizations,
and institutions. No matter what your situation requires, the project teams at Reinvent
Media are committed to ensuring your success.

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 TCID PROPOSAL

Project Costs and Plan Benefits

As shown in the Appendix (Table A), the implementation of our plan would cost an
estimated $89,295. We believe this investment in the TCID department will not only
preserve the current enrollment rates but significantly increase them as well. The
Budget Rationale and Budget Table in the Appendix will provide a closer look at the
individual costs and why they are necessary for the success of this plan.

Next, we would like to summarize the advantages of our plan. According to some of
our research and observations, the TCID department lacks students even though there
is a large demand for Technical Communication and Interactive Design degrees. We
strongly believe this shortage of students is due to a lack of awareness among potential
students. These issues will be addressed through the implementation of our project
plan.

Below, we have outlined the benefits using three different categories: hard benefits, soft
benefits, and value benefits.

Hard Benefits
Hard benefits are the quantifiable outcomes of the project that you will be able to see
and receive. These benefits are listed below.
• As a result of the first phase in the project plan, we will provide and facilitate
several program showcasing opportunities. Therefore, the TCID department will
receive promotional video content and the necessary equipment to host
promotional events.

• In addition to the promotional

content and events, Reinvent
Media will be working with you
to develop an improved social
media presence. This will
include professionally designed
content, posting schedules, and
guidelines that can be used on
multiple social media platforms.
In Figure 5, an example of
posting guidelines is displayed.
We will produce similar
guidelines for the platforms you
plan to utilize. Figure 5. - Posting Guideline Example: act.com

• Phase two of our project plan includes a redesign of the TCID department’s
website. During this phase, you will receive a heuristic evaluation of the site,
which is a detailed report of all the strengths and weaknesses shown by the
interface. At the conclusion of phase two, you will receive an improved interface

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 TCID PROPOSAL
design that functions properly, draws attention, and follows the existing KSU
style guide.

Soft Benefits
Soft benefits are intangible advantages that you will gain by working with our
company. These benefits are listed below.
• Many of the steps in our project plan generate many positive qualities for the
TCID department. With the presence of the hard benefits mentioned above, your
department will gain a higher level of efficiency. This efficiency will be
experienced in regard to your media management and event planning.

• The addition of refreshed media, functioning interfaces, and engaging events will
start to build trust and satisfaction between the TCID department and students
(both existing and future).

• The results from each phase will develop confidence in your staff regarding the
stability of your department. This will create a more comfortable and productive
environment for students and staff.

Value Benefits
Value benefits are the common values, ideals, and standards shared by your institution
and our company. These benefits are listed below.
• At Reinvent Media, we understand the importance of maintaining your values.
Similar to your institution, we believe in generating impact and inspiring others.
We plan to utilize the assistance of KSU alumni during promotional events and
in social media content, which promotes your desire to be student-inspired.

• Reinvent Media is home to many KSU graduates, so we feel personally

connected to your institution. The personnel who will be active on this project,
Morgan Patterson and Lauren Duty, both graduated from the TCID department.
We understand the needs of your department, and we would love to play a
continued role in the success of the TCID programs.

Figure 6. KSU Graduates: registrar.kennesaw.edu

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 TCID PROPOSAL

The benefits listed above will start to build a brighter future for the TCID department.
With our media improvements to your website and social media structure, your
department will see an increase in student enrollement.

We believe that Reinvent Media will help the TCID department at KSU move forward
and continue growing as an entity that inspires students. We look forward to achieving
the previously mentioned benefits through our collaborative efforts. Thank you for your
time and consideration. We look forward to hearing from you regarding this proposal.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact Morgan Patterson at
(000) 000-0000 or Lauren Duty at (000) 000-0000.

Appendix
Budget Rational
In this appendix, we would like to go over some of the major costs of the plan.

As seen below, personal salaries and benefits make up the largest majority of the overall
budget. This covers the expertise and skillsets that are necessary for the completion of
this project. There will be two professionals working on the project plan, and each
requires a different salary based on the time spent working. The combined salary cost
will be $71,270.

We want to provide the best quality promotional content and event planning.
Therefore, we are requesting several estimated amounts to cover the cost of department
promotion. The total estimated cost is $16,350. However, this amount is negotiable as
we are offering some flexibility in this area. You may decide to spend less or more in
this area as you see necessary.

The total cost for social media designs and assistance is $900. Similar to the marketing
fees, this cost is flexible and may be subject to change. This is the amount that we
recommend based on our preliminary evaluations.

The last phase of the project plan requires a heuristic evaluation and an interface
redesign. The estimated cost for these two items is $775.

Table A: The Budget

Item Cost

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 TCID PROPOSAL

Personnel Salaries and Benefits

Morgan Patterson $40,386.00
Lauren Duty $30,884.00

Marketing Fees
Videography $3,500.00
Event Venues $7,850.00
Event Supplies $5,000.00

Social Media
Content Design $700.00
Posting Schedule and Guidelines $200.00

Website Redesign
Heuristic Evaluation $275.00
Interface Design $500.00
Total $89,295.00

References
TCID Department webpage: https://radow.kennesaw.edu/tcid/

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